Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By : Samuli Thomasson
Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By: Samuli Thomasson

Overview of this book

Haskell, with its power to optimize the code and its high performance, is a natural candidate for high performance programming. It is especially well suited to stacking abstractions high with a relatively low performance cost. This book addresses the challenges of writing efficient code with lazy evaluation and techniques often used to optimize the performance of Haskell programs. We open with an in-depth look at the evaluation of Haskell expressions and discuss optimization and benchmarking. You will learn to use parallelism and we'll explore the concept of streaming. We’ll demonstrate the benefits of running multithreaded and concurrent applications. Next we’ll guide you through various profiling tools that will help you identify performance issues in your program. We’ll end our journey by looking at GPGPU, Cloud and Functional Reactive Programming in Haskell. At the very end there is a catalogue of robust library recommendations with code samples. By the end of the book, you will be able to boost the performance of any app and prepare it to stand up to real-world punishment.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Haskell High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Tweaking the Compiler and Runtime System (GHC)

In the previous chapter, we got programmed concurrent applications and used the related powerful features of GHC. Next we concentrate on tuning GHC and its Runtime System. For the best performance, it's necessary to tune the compiler and Runtime System according to the application's specific needs. For instance, heavy number crunching benefits greatly from a different compilation path using LLVM, at the expense of longer compilation times and portability. There are lots of useful options, tricks, and tweaks available in GHC that we will look at in this chapter.

This chapter attempts to highlight the most important flags and options in GHC and RTS. It's not meant to be a substitute for GHC UserGuide, which is much more comprehensive. Instead, we cover options in a systematic and easy-to-follow way, starting with compiler options and proceeding with Runtime System options.

At the end of this chapter, the reader will understand the big...